[Off-topic] Dirk:
Ok, there's not much going on round here so i'll get my Friday night ramble out of the way. I'm getting pissed off with the ridiculous media coverage of the recent CERN announcement that suggests a breaking of the accepted speed limit of light.

Ignoring the propensity that reporters have of distorting the facts, let's look at the evidence. The physicists conducting the experiments have expressed concerns over the reliability of the tests, not over the results of the tests. They have called upon the community to find fault with the experiment, not the conclusion. This is the scientific method. It's why the scientific community can be trusted over the media community!

Nobody in the scientific community is wondering how Neutrinos are travelling faster than light. They are trying instead to find the error in the experiment so that the experiment itself can be fixed. I'll explain why...

We know that the speed of light is an absolute limit on speed. Nobody is in any doubt about that. Why? It's simple, Photons have no mass. For any object to travel it needs energy. The more massive the object, the more energy required to move it. (Have you ever tried moving a wardrobe?) Take any object, even one as small as a Neutrino as an example. It has mass.. albeit a very small one. To accelerate that neutrino takes energy. To accelerate an object with mass to the speed of light would take an infinite amount of energy. i.e more energy than exists in the entire universe...and it still wouldn't quite get there!

To hear people talking about travelling faster than light to go back in time is simply laughable. Time slows down as you approach the speed of light, but as that limit is absolute you can't then go beyond it and mess with causality. I'm all for science fiction, until it's passed off as fact!

Neutrinos themselves are fascinating particles though! They stream from our sun unimpeded by the forces that act upon other particles, including photons! Whereas it may take a Photon thousands of years to escape from the core of the Sun to reach us, Neutrinos have no such problems. They react weakly with normal matter so they travel through other particles like ghosts. Hold your finger in the air for a second...a billion Neutrinos just passed right through your fingertip :eek: Did you feel anything?

Imagine how many just passed right through the Earth in the same time-frame! How many do you think interacted with the matter that they passed though? Not many! Elusive buggers is what they are. The detectors we've built to see them are deep underground, usually in defunct mines. The reason for that is to try and eradicate the noise from the rest of the planet that would ruin the experiment.

The funny thing is, everyone assumes the detectors are trying to pick up Neutrinos coming from that side of the planet. They're not. They are looking for Neutrinos coming from the other side of the planet from the detector. Essentially they're using the entire width of the planet as a filter, hoping that the occasional one might actually interact with something that can be measured!

Anyway, this concludes this week's educational broadcast. Hope you learned something! :p